I find this problem again and again in various wikis and forums including this one. What I don't find is an easy solution. I've tried changing libraries, the driver in my xorg.conf file (ati, fglrx, radeon) and various other fixes. All with no luck.

Previously I got movies to run successfully in both Xine and Mplayer by running

Code:

aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

but this is supposed to be a no no for games (slows them down).

I am looking to get direct rendering running.

In truth I didn't even know the card wasn't working properly until today. But now that I've spent several hours on it I'm getting kind of disappointed in ATI.

It appears that the 8.28.8 driver although the latest one available for my card, was written before the 2.6 kernal came out. Therefore it lacks the support required for direct rendering in Vector 5.8 standard. The best hope therefore is for an improvement in the open source drivers for this card. I don't know where to look for one more recent than the one packaged with Vector 5.8 standard. This one does work. Tt does not work well for me however and eventually it fails totally.

I plucked this from another forum

Quote

How to build ATI 8.28.8 driver on kernel 2.6.18.

(Issue is that UTS_RELEASE define has moved from include/linux/version.h to the (new) include/linux/utsrelease.h)

What happens in step 4 of the previous post is that the source code is being altered so that it will compile under a 2.6.18 kernel. Without the patches, the 8.28.8 ATI driver won't build on kernel 2.6.18.

I would be very interested in the patch set...right now the latest drivers the build on the 2.6.18 kernel are the 8.30.3...I would even like to be able to include older ati drivers to get better ati support in the SuperVL edition

Unfortunately I do. When I run without the proprietary driver X eventually fails. I can recover with VASM but eventually that fails also. When I run with the proprietary driver (even though as I now know it is not working correctly) the system is stable.

I was looking into Beryl as the OSS driver is supposed to work well with it. Unfortunately most of the HOW TO's are missing from the forum right now and I am getting a little confused by various other sources of info on it.

I did however get Xorg 7.2.0 installed.Did that ever screw up the old unpatched proprietary driver!!!I attempted to change the screen settings and down went X!!!I still can't recover the settings for that user.

For now I am running on the OSS driver. But I forsee a re install in the near future.

to get a new xorg.conf. It produced a very different file than either the original install or the aticonfig. Then I compared it to a working xorg.conf. I started cutting away a piece at a time and changing things like monitor refresh rates to match the old file until I figured I had a minimum working xorg.conf file. With each cut I restarted X ctrl-alt-backspace to verify I had not cut something vital.

I kept getting a blank screen loading dri until I uncommented the module path. I also added

Code:

/sbin/modprobe radeon

to my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

From there I had different results than the LinuxQuestions thread. My card has far less options enabled than almost any other I have read about. I would like to note that many other users of this card had to have AGP options enabled even if they had PCI cards. The "AGPmode" also sometimes required a different numerical value. Other cards had to have options I haven't listed here. So my only advise after 11 days of on and off trying, is to try them one at a time restarting X between changes until you are successful.

Another oddity I encountered was that fps is supposed to go up when you cover glxgears up because the card is not actually drawing on the screen. In my case fps plunged down below the original levels. I Don't know if that is significant.

I also have had trouble with long term stability running this card with the OSS driver so if it fails I will post my result here again.

This does not negate the fact that direct rendering has been enabled. Rather it seems to be a seperate issue with X.I will persue that problem under a seperate post in the section of the forum dedicated to X issues.

Well I've been pursuing this in another thread believing it to be X related because I had direct rendering enabled. But it is just the driver.

I am back to the proprietary driver and believe I have located the source of the problem with it.

Code:

modprobe fglrxFATAL: Module fglrx not found.

some more bungling around revealed that I need to make the fglrx module so:

Code:

lib/modules/fglrxroot:# sh ./make_install.sh*** WARNING ***Tailored kernel module for fglrx not present in your system.You must go to /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod subdirand execute './make.sh' to build a fully customed kernel module.Afterwards go to /lib/modules/fglrx and run './make_install.sh'in order to install the module into your kernel's module repository.(see readme.txt for more details.)

As of now you can still run your XServer in 2D, but hardware acceleratedOpenGL will not work and 2D graphics will lack performance.

and because there is no kernel module as above

Code:

lib/modules/fglrx/build_modroot:# sh ./make.shATI module generator V 2.0==========================initializing...cat: /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version-*.h: No such file or directoryError:kernel includes at /usr/src/linux/include do not match current kernel.they are versioned as ""instead of "2.6.21.1".you might need to adjust your symlinks:- /usr/include- /usr/src/linux

but repeatinglib/modules/fglrxroot:# sh ./make_install.shgave the same result.